Guild Wars 2

Still have the problem. appears only,when a lot of people are around me.

I will try change my audio settings to lower settings.
I always get this at big battles.

Even after lowering my settings it happened again today on The Claw of Jormag!

Please fix! This sucks!

Am also having this issue, though no popping sounds or anything like that. More like a pulsating siren sound in a lower octave.

This bug happens to me still during big fights in WvW or with dragons. For a while I thought it might be some sort of awkward compatibility issue with my bose sound system but with so many people having the same problem I’m glad it isn’t that. I’ve tried everything from switching my settings, even un/re plugging my sound system. Settings in game don’t make a difference and you definitely have to restart the game for it to stop. It can also cause the game to crash, as I’ve been in the middle of these fights and turned my sound off to finish the fight before resetting and I’ve crashed after 5 or 6 minutes.

Sometimes, after resetting the game it will start happening again within 2 or 3 minutes of getting back into the game.

Still happening. Sometimes i just get the noise and have to mute game, other times i get noise and shortly after game crashed. This occurs in both PVE and WVW.

I can reproduce the tone sound error that causes my game to crash. All I have to do is participate in the Claw of Jormag fight. A few mins into the fight the tone starts, I shut my speakers off and continue fighting. About 2 mins later I crash out. Today I got no loot from the fight (no big deal… kinda like missing Christmas) because I crashed out twice, I’m guessing-no chest, others got stuff. When I exit to desktop and return the sound is fine. I only experienced it one other place and it was only once during the Tequatl fight. Jormag is everytime. I hear the alien ships landing too, but frankly I thought it was part of the game-came here from Star Wars, so yeah. Besides that isn’t affecting game play, for me anyway. I have a high end computer and no sound issues anywhere else-warcraft and star wars both play fine on it, as well as skyrim. This is the only game having issues and I will just not do the jormag fight until your gurus can figure it out… Im only lvl 62 anyway.

Correction, it is now happening on all three dragon fights-Tequatl, Shatterer, and Jormag. Nowhere else, for me that is. I wonder if it is something with the screams the dragons make-they are so awesome, but maybe its too much? Leaving the area does not reset it, messing with the sound settings doesn’t fix it either. Exiting does. Ah well, got 2 yellows off Teq… made up for Jormag

Lochlin.9752:

I can reproduce the tone sound error that causes my game to crash. All I have to do is participate in the Claw of Jormag fight. A few mins into the fight the tone starts, I shut my speakers off and continue fighting. About 2 mins later I crash out.

Yeah, i get this bug almost always when fighting Claw of Jormag with a lot of people.

X-Fi Gamer on Win7 x64

Happened again.
WvW, 30 people assaulting a keep. Wall went down, everyone funneled in through the wall, there was a lot of siege hitting around me. The last thing I heard before siren started was an explosion sound.

I have no way to reproduce the echo sound. As for any other sounds. I can’t say I have run into those. I have changed my default audio setting and the first time I did it. I heard no sound what so ever. Not even in game sound(IE background spell casting, music, and evno. sound. Or sound outside of the game. my audio was turned off in and out of game. ) After resetting things back to default again (in game menu)I got my audio working(on game / off )

OK…happened to me 1st time in WvW today, hope get fixed soon

Dunno, if these was indeed reported via the gui, so here few app crash with this annoying sound bug.

I get this bug as well. Happens in almost all dragon fights or in WvWvW zerg battles. Never happens in dungeons, events etc… where there are not more than 20 people max. Seems clearly related to amount of people in a fight. Maybe it’s related to generating sounds from all the active parties in a fight??

Changing the Audio setting to High Quality creates this issue, moving back to Lower Quality solves this issue.

malevolence.9487:

Changing the Audio setting to High Quality creates this issue, moving back to Lower Quality solves this issue.

Indeed. I think for the sake of newcomers to this thread, this can’t be repeated enough. I’ve only reduced my sound quality one notch below max (which is still above mid-way).

A question (for anyone at ArenaNet willing to answer): If I’m not mistaken, there are 5 notches on the audio quality slider. I’d love to know exactly what happens audio-wise with each notch. (Similarly with the latency slider).

Thanks, and good luck tracking this one down!

I have the same problem here. The bug usually happens in very large battles, e.g. fighting one of the dragon lieutenants or WvW. It happened after the dragon smashed its claw in the ground, sound completely cut off and was replaced with a pulsating tone. Only restarting the game solves the problem. Changing settings doesn’t help.
I’m using a usb headset – Razer Megalodon.
The thing is, I’ve never had the same problem before, it started happening right after the patch where you could change the sound quality/stability settings.
I hope this gets fixed.

A friend I using the built-in motherboard Audio both had this sound pulse issue and with both of us it caused the game to freeze or crash. In my friends instance his machine would freeze first (audio would stop) then the Audio pulse would start moment later. His computer was a low spec (near the bottom system requirement). Mine was the opposite audio pulse would come first I would play for another 2-5 mins before a complete freeze of the game only (we both could Ctrl+Alt+Delete). My machine is much higher spec’d: Ivy Bridge i5 3570k w/ Nvidia GTX670. All of this only happened in WvW but we didn’t play much of the large event PvE which seems the other instance everyone has issue with.

I am getting this same issues.

Seems to happen during large events where a lot of people are fighting… At points when their are a lot of different sounds being played rapidly at the same time.

It is almost like it get overloaded and fails and leave you with the alarm to let you know it broke.

B Katt.9140:

I am getting this same issues.

Seems to happen during large events where a lot of people are fighting… At points when their are a lot of different sounds being played rapidly at the same time.

It is almost like it get overloaded and fails and leave you with the alarm to let you know it broke.

The work around mentioned a few times in the previous pages is to turn down Sound Quality. I managed by reducing mine from max to 50% on the slider. Haven’t had the issue for a month now (or about that).

Wow, The game is actually making that sound?? LOL! I thought it was a hardware alarm telling me my CPU was over heating or something. Every time I would check my temp would be in the mid 30’s. I was so confused. Hah!

Well i got a game. I got to say its a big of a let sound hearing the sound stutter like that. I get a slight FPS drop and sound make a stutter/popping sound. Any idea for a fix. Its really letting the game down. No other game does this. From skyrim to borderlands 2.

This issue is happening way too frequently, and as of late, it has begun making Guild Wars 2 go “not responding” and I have to CTRL+ALT+DELETE to get out and into the game again. Which is very frustrating when it happens during a WvW fight. Cuz when I get back in, I’m obviously not in WvW anymore.

I really wish you could do something about this soon

I have been reading on this bug since early august and still no fix. Feels like it’s just been stuffed in a drawer and don’t really care. This is the worst bug I have ever had in a game as far as annoying. I will keep checking back and come back and play when it’s fixed. Absolutely horrible.

A month and no fix? This displeases me.

Please fix. Sometimes I get into really epic WvWvW battles and then BAM, that sound comes up and basically ruins everything. In order to fix it, I have to restart my Guild Wars 2. Please fix this ANet.

Jason King.2647:

Hey everyone,

Thanks for continuing to give us details about this bug! I just checked with one of our programmers, and he’s still hard at working tracking this one down; I’ve passed on the information about the sound slider reducing the chances of it happening as well.

As before, please let us know if you find an exact way to consistently reproduce this issue, especially if you find a way to do it outside of a huge group of people.

Thank you for your patience and understanding; we’ll continue to work on this one and update as more information comes in.

It essentially seems to occur only when there’s a large amount of sound effects going off at once. I get it every time I do Claw of Jormag, or am involved in a large WvW battle 100% of the time. It really sucks because it’s hard to play with no sound, however there’s absolutely no way to stop it without turning off the game. If we have to quit to fix it, we lose our place in WvW if we are in it.

A workaround suggestion, at least until the issue is fixed: Let us reset the sound buffer. Honestly to me it sounds like it is crashing, or otherwise breaking. If we can reset it without resetting the game, it would at least help alleviate serious issues caused by this. Perhaps just a button in the Sound Options would be sufficient.

Edit: A thought just occurred to me: Perhaps old sound drivers are the cause? I shall try to update mine and see if it does anything.

Edit 2: No luck updating my drivers, apparently they’re already up to date.

Just add me to the list as well. The ocillating audio “alarm” issue happens every time The Claw of Jormag shows up and frequently in Wv3. It also occurs in other large PvE battles involving lots of players. I’ve submitted bug reports in-game. Can we please get an official update on the status of this problem? It’s making the game unplayable.

Boom. Happened to me 3 times today. I’m on the list

Started getting the siren issue about 2-3 weeks ago even though I’ve been playing essentially since launch. I used to get only the beeping sound once in a while, particularly at the dragon events, without the game freezing. I would just take my headphones out of my ears until I can reset.

But now the problem has upgraded to the game crashing almost as soon as the beeping noise starts (10-20sec after) only at the Claw of Jormag event (happened 3 times just today). Have to close the game with Ctrl+Alt+Del, yadayadayada. Pop back into the game, praying I still have time to get some loot. I thought that this was a problem with my rig, but I found out today that a couple of guildies have been having the same issue. I’m really disappointed to find out that this is a widespread problem that has been out there for over a month with still no proper fix.

I’ll try lowering the quality of my sound, and I’ll tell my friends who have been having the same issue to do the same. I guess we’ll see what happens, but really looking forward to an official fix to this problem.

Happened 3 times to me today, only in WvW.

This thread’s been up for more than a month. I expect this of EA but not Arena Net.

It’s still happening. 5 times over 2 days of wvw.

weird. everytime i log in or go to WvW i here a random bark. by that i mean some human saying " eat my dust" or something like that when they get a boon. doesnt happen often like for everyone else but its weird to hear it when no ones around. im sure its not my character but well i dont ever hear girl character say that and im sure i dont have a speed buff going at the time either.

+1 to this post.

As others have said happens with ALL Dragon Events and in WvW – Anything more than around 15 on 15. Sound quality was on maximum and this crash occured at least once every half an hour. I have turned it down sound quality slider down to about 50% and have since had this ear kitten only happen 3 times in the past fortnight (in the same types of situations). So for a temp fix, turn your sound quality down – small price to pay to not have to que for another 3 hours only to have your WvW crash in the first 3 minutes.

Add me to those people who turning down the slider resolved this issue. With sound at the max settings, I would usually get this within seconds of the first WvW fight. Basically it was from having too much going on (Too many sounds playing at once)

That being said, I doubt we’ll get a fix any time soon since the #1 priority right now for the team is fixing the culling issues. At least there’s a temporary alleviation to this, and if you get it anyway you can always restart the game.

I would imagine that’s why it’s taking so long, and frankly that’s the way it should be.

Ive had this happen randomly twice now, once in WvWvW and another time during a large event… so it seems like just a multitude of stuff oging on. Will reduce sound and will post again if it fails. Just started outta nowhere, never had this issue till yesterday.

Makovorn.1706:

I had this some weeks ago (I posted in this thread as well). What seems to have solved it (or at least lessened the frequency of this bug), was:

• Putting the “Mixing Buffer Size” to half way

• Putting the "Sound Quality* one notch below highest quality

I also have all my other volumes about 1/4 down from maximum (don’t know if that would help).

I have not noticed any decrease in sound quality by doing this, and I’ve been free of this irritating bug for more than 2 weeks now.

IMPORTANT: If you guys try this and it works, please come back to this thread and confirm it, as I think that the ArenaNet folks are very much still scratching their heads with this one and I’m sure feedback (either way) will help them track down the cause of this anomaly.

This solved my problem, I’ve been free of the sound bug for 2 weeks now! Give it a try if you’re having the same problem!

From a technical point of view, GW2’s launch was pretty ok from my point of view.

I did suffer from lags early on due to some provider issues and I still need to force the game to use port 80 to not get disconnected (rather than the standard port) but besides that, the game itself has been pretty smooth.

Lately however I’ve been experiencing more frequent crashes and total freezes than before. The game seems to be getting less stable, rather than more stable.

The most common crash-bug is one where the sound will start looping….giving off a weird WWWEEEEEEEUUUWWWWEEEEEEUUUU sound (like UFO’s landing) just before the game freezes and crashes.

This typically happens in “crowded situations” like popular DE, WvW Sieges or Dragon Fights. Needless to say this is really annoying because it manages to ruin the best parts of the game.

I didn’t bother writing down the error codes since I’ve submitted a crash-report every time.

I just need to know if something is being done about this issue in tomorrow’s patch.

I’m getting this sound bug too… It’s so annoying, I only get this when I’m in WvW.

At first I thought that it was something wrong with my PC. But then when GW2 crashed after a while it stopped so I figured it came from the GW2 client. I hope that they fix this pretty soon. I can’t even play 30min of WvW and now I need to reqeue for WvW… awesome…

Thanks for not fixing this most annoying of bugs.

It’s really fun having to relaunch the game at random intervals because of this BS.

I had not heard of this bug until today when it happened to me three times in an hour.

I get this bug on a semi-regular basis as well. G930 USB headset.

anet will not fix this, it has been over a month, and they said they would have a fix in a few days. so just go to your options, select audio, and turn your quality down to crappy. it wont happen any more

I was playing some WvW today, to get my monthly kills, when a few things happened.

The first was that while I was attacking a tower with a lot of other people, All sound stopped and then a loud low-tone sound faded in and out of just my LEFT headphone. I alt tabbed to see if something weird was going on, when Guild Wars 2 just stopped working. When I ended the process in Task Manager, the beeping also stopped.

Then the next time, (Same tower) I froze while attacking a person. The first time I figured it was just too much stuff on the screen at once, but this was facing away from the tower.

After this, and thoroughly annoyed, come back once again, in time for the gates to fall, and luckily no freezes or beeping. Then I go with the group I was with to assault another tower, and the beeping came back and then the game froze. I was especially worried after this last time because the beeping DID NOT STOP after Guild Wars 2 was closed. I had to restart my computer just to make it stop.

If anyone has had this problem and solved it, I’m eager to hear how.

Just curious, is everyone here using some form of USB-based soundcard?
I’m using a FiiO E17 USB DAC, and I see that DavidGX above, as well as a few others in the previous page, are all using USB headsets. This might just be a coincidence but if enough people are in the same boat then it might be worth looking into.

I’m also using 24 bit 96 kHz as the default audio format in Windows advanced audio settings.

I remember trying changing audio quality settings and still getting the issue which is why I have it changed back to Highest. I’ll try using defaults again and report back if I no longer get the issue.

Kaon.7192:

Just curious, is everyone here using some form of USB-based soundcard?
I’m using a FiiO E17 USB DAC, and I see that DavidGX above, as well as a few others in the previous page, are all using USB headsets. This might just be a coincidence but if enough people are in the same boat then it might be worth looking into.

I’m also using 24 bit 96 kHz as the default audio format in Windows advanced audio settings.

I remember trying changing audio quality settings and still getting the issue which is why I have it changed back to Highest. I’ll try using defaults again and report back if I no longer get the issue.

Nope I’m using standard onboard sound (I have a Mac, and the crash can happen on OS X and Windows).

Setting your audio settings to 16 bit / 44.1 kHz may help though – would be interesting to test. There is no humanly perceptible difference between 16/44.1 and 24/96, despite what hi-fi marketing folks want you to believe, so you won’t notice any difference in audio quality.

I’m still experiencing this bug. Only in WvW. But what the others say might be true. I think I remember it one time in PvE at a bigger event. Must be because with the lots of players (sometimes at bigger events and very often at WvW if 2 zergs fight each other) lots of sound is generated and this probably is causing some trouble for the sound device or for the drivers.

I even had the client crash one time(not reacting anymore and I had to kill the process). Fortunately I don’t like WvW that much and only trying to get the monthly kills for the achievement.

I have onboard sound. Does it really help to turn down the sound quality settings? I might try this. Sound quality usually I don’t hear that much difference.

I have a modern, fairly high-end PC.

i5-3450
Samsung 830 SSD with 256GB of RAM
Radeon HD 7850 with 2048 MB
Windows 7 – 64 bit
Sennheiser PC333D Headset + Soundcard
8 GB of DDR 1600 RAM

In fact, GW2 was my primary reason to get this new PC when I did.

Now generally speaking, everything seems to run fine most of the time. But as of recent…in the past 2 weeks maybe, frequent crashes in busy situations (farming Plinx, storming keeps, zerg vs. zerg battles etc.) are really ruining the fun of WvW especially, where things can get very intense at times.

The crash is always the same, a total freez-up of the entire system, forcing me to use to task-manager to shut down and restart GW2. Often this is announced with a weird WEEEUUEEE sound looping bug after which the game crashes a few seconds later.

I will point out again that this wasn’t always the case. In fact in many ways the earlier versions of this game seemed to run better and more fluently.

Same exact thing happens to me, 3 times in WvW and once fighting the Champion Family Sized Candy Corn Elemental in Mad King’s Labrynth. Same sound bug too, and it’s only started doing this recently.